History comes to life at Utah museum

This October 2011 photo courtesy of Natural History Museum of Utah/Tom Smart shows the Collections Wall and topographical map at the Natural History Museum of Utah at the Rio Tinto Center in Salt Lake City. Museum-goers are taking in the smell and feel of ancient life and landscapes at a new $100 million building in Salt Lake City. The Natural History Museum of Utah engages the senses, allowing visitors to mingle inside exhibits, touch things, get a whiff of desert plants or rotting flesh and hear the soft warbling of ancient birds. (AP Photo/Natural History Museum of Utah, Tom Smart)

The Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY — Museum-goers are taking in the sounds, smell and feel of ancient life and landscapes at a new $100 million building in Salt Lake City.

The Natural History Museum of Utah engages the senses, allowing visitors to mingle inside exhibits, touch artifacts, get a whiff of desert plants or rotting flesh and hear the soft warbling of birds.

People are even walking on top of exhibits, with glass-panel floors covering fossil dig sites.

Over the years, they’ll also be able to watch paleontologists separate fossils from rock in a glass-walled working laboratory.

The museum, which opened Nov. 18, is located in the Rio Tinto Center on the University of Utah campus.

The center’s copper and stone exterior is designed to blend into the high foothills of the Wasatch Range, and it’s named for the mining company that donated the copper — 100,000 pounds of it — for the outside panels.

The center was also designed to meet specifications for top ratings from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Green Building systems, with features like a planted roof and parking tiers that percolate rainwater.

Rooftop solar panels will satisfy a quarter of the building’s energy demands.

The best way to browse the 50,000 square feet of exhibit space is to spiral down from the top floor and backward in time, curators say.

From the fifth level, which was turned over to Utah’s five major Indian tribes, ramps descend into an 80-foot-deep lobby called The Canyon.

There are plenty of objects to touch, including a wall of human skulls — cast from the real thing — that demonstrate the passage of evolution. Other fossil casts with “Please Touch!” signs include a giant alligator in the main showroom that “ate dinosaurs for lunch,” said Randy Irmis, the museum’s curator of paleontology.

For children, the place is irresistible.

They can get inside dig sites and turn over artifacts, turn on faucets to carve rivers in a table of sand, or aim fans to control the shape of sand dunes.

They can also spend time exploring and experimenting in supervised science labs.